'Funny Once' finds insight in the ordinary

4of6Antonya Nelson shares the Cullen Chair in creative writing with her husband, Robert Boswell, at the University of Houston.Photo: Dana Kroos

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English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon once said, "Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is."

Antonya Nelson proves a shrewd sounding board for the absurdities of life in "Funny Once," a series of short stories - a few already have appeared in the New Yorker - bookended by a novella, "Three Wishes." By magnifying the subtext of routine, Nelson weaves surprises and epiphanies in spaces that usually seem mundane and ordinary.

This is the seventh story collection from Nelson, who shares the Cullen Chair in creative writing at the University of Houston with her husband, writer Robert Boswell. Often called a master of the domestic drama, Nelson tailors the stories in "Funny Once" from the broad human tapestries of marriage, divorce, infidelity, love, loss, adolescence, aging and death. She creates touching, carefully crafted dioramas of the familiar neighborhoods, living rooms and bedrooms of Houston and the expansive endlessness of other places, including Colorado and Kansas.

Upon reading the book's first offering, "Literally," I realized that one has to be in a certain place in life to fully appreciate Nelson's stories. Not so much a certain age, but perched from a certain perspective (usually far enough along on the timeline to be capable of retrospect) to properly respect cynicism, irony, nostalgia, settling, disappointment, sacrifice and, most of all, mistakes. Most of her protagonists are divorced or about to be. Others are unhappily married or uncomfortably single or widowed. And none is remarkable (or even necessarily likable). There is no scholar, adventurer or wealthy jet-setter, no femme fatale or hero/heroine - no overachiever. But there are plenty of "middles" - middle class, middle of the road, Middle America, midlife - muddling through the motions until, well, life happens.

And boy, does it happen, in nearly formulaic manner in Nelson's laboratory. She takes a controlled environment and inserts just enough malady and dysfunction to heighten anticipation and apprehension. In fact, most of the stories indulge the same themes: Philandering male? Probably. Bored wife? Yes. Betrayal and heartbreak? Most definitely. Death and/or suicide? Check. However, the mark of a good storyteller is the ability to make every plot fresh and engaging, which Nelson does as masterfully as a beauty shop gossip, arousing my undivided attention to these recurring, timeless themes.

In one of my favorites, "Soldier's Joy," Nana, a childless woman in a May-December marriage with her former grad school professor, leaves Houston for Kansas to check on her aging parents. (Her dad has been injured crashing his car into a café.) During her visit, she discovers that her high school sweetheart, Pete, lives next door to her parents. Peter and Nana's reunion reaches across the years, "a snaking heat coalesced between them, something engineered out of naughtiness and nostalgia, the knowledge of a shared naked history, wavering there like a faint layer of pollution." That "history" draws them into a brief, reckless romance. When Nana calls her best friend, Helen, to tell her of the titillating transgression, she's told by Helen's daughter that her mother isn't home because she's with Nana's husband (the conveniently named Dr. Shock), and it's an affair that has been going on for years. How could she not have known? The kicker: Nana and Helen had both pursued the professor in their college days. Upon learning the news, Nana contemplates the aftermath of betrayal - the slow unraveling of a security blanket: "It was so exhausting to consider, the whole past that she would have to revisit and amend, unstitch and patch back together, her husband and her friend ..."

Another favorite and the collection's novella, "Three Wishes," opens irreverently with the Panik family (pronounced like panic). The story is told through a trio of siblings: the slightly self-righteous mother hen eldest sister; the devil-may-care, dispassionate middle brother; and the flighty, self-effacing youngest sister. The siblings have orchestrated a plan to get their stubborn patriarch - handily in the grip of dementia - to a nursing home by duct-taping him to his recliner and sitting him in the back of the son's pickup. This is Nelson's imagination at its best. The ride from the nursing home begins a journey wherein the mother hen sister loses her family and her job; the dispassionate brother finds passion in a married woman (and promptly abandons his hopes after being confronted by a brutish, heartbroken husband); and the self-effacing baby sister is thrust into an uncomfortable moment when the father of her old-soul, sensitive son shows up on her doorstep.

The book's title, "Funny Once," is taken from a short story of the same name featuring a chronically unhappy woman, Phoebe, whose therapist advises her to abstain from drinking. In a moment of tortured sobriety, Phoebe hears an intoxicated friend repeat a witty but well-worn saying. Phoebe promises herself that when she does return to drinking - and she plans to, sooner rather than later - she will remember: It's only funny once. And therein lies the overarching message. We're expected to laugh at our shortcomings at some point in the near or extended future, and it is one of life's absurdities to live in too much misbegotten mirth. But betrayal, infidelity, loss and loneliness are only as funny as the awkward angle at which one hits a funny bone, all nerve-endings and numbness. It's an angle that Nelson targets artfully and methodically - and hits dead-on.